A Thursday Nonet
The world thinks they were abandoned by
their guide boat in shark-infested
waters, but the truth is that
another boat came for
the honeymooners,
swept them away
to a new
better
life
Day 38 of The Stafford Challenge – Plan B
Sweet Potato Kitty Cat – Stafford Challenge Day 37
I went to lunch with some colleagues last week, and we ordered our food in the produce section of a local farm to table restaurant. Imagine our sheer delight when we encountered this cat napping in the sweet potato bin. This is no red potato, friends. Here is the couch potato of cats, right here in rural Georgia.
I Yam What I Yam
I yam what I yam
cat at the farmer’s market
napping in the yams
I’m a lazy and fat
sweet potato kitty cat
….and me?aw, I’m good with that.
Day 5 of February’s Open Write with Amber Harrison of Oklahoma, Day 36 of The Stafford Challenge
Today’s host at http://www.ethicalela.com for Day 5 of the February Open Write is Amber Harrison of Oklahoma, who inspires writers to write a borrowed form poem using a fill-in-the-blank approach. You can read her prompt and the poems of others here.
Amber writes:
Today, I invite you to fill in the blanks in these lines by Whitman, or create and refill blanks of a stanza by another poet of your choice (this could be a time when you fill in the blanks expressively or reflectively in zine form):
I celebrate ________,
And what I _____ you ______,
For every ____________________ me as good
___________________ you.
Original lines by Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Stolen Socks
I celebrate stolen socks
And what I tug, you wrangle
For every muscle moved by me as good
as hackles you.
Slice of Life, Day 4 of The February Open Write, and Day 35 of The Stafford Challenge – Epistolary Poem/Letter to My Younger Self
Today at http://www.ethicalela.com, Britt Decker of Houston, Texas is our host for this fourth day of the February Open Write. You can read her full prompt and the poems of others here as she challenges us to write letters (epistolary poems) to our younger selves.
When anyone with human flesh
gives you advice
look them straight in the eyes
and say ~firmly~
I’ll take it into consideration.
Do not take it as gospel.
Guard yourself.
Do your own research.
They aren’t experts.
Live your own life
not the one they choose for you.
Notice more,
especially the
hands
in photos (it’s the unseen key
that will slap you
~hard in the face~
like a wet whaletail
when you finally see).
Don’t believe a single promise.
Above all,
practice your mother’s discernment.
She knew.
She knew.
Remembering Miriam on Her Heavenly Birthday – Stafford Challenge Day 34
Today’s host at http://www.ethicalela.com for the third day of February’s Open Write is Dr. Sarah Donovan, who inspires us to write poems that experiment with broken lines. You can read her prompt here, along with the poems of others.
I took the ghazal form today of 5 couplets with AA BA CA DA EA rhyme scheme and measured meter, reframed the whole form, relaxed the rules and broke the lines as I thought of my mother’s 81st birthday and the moments I’m so glad my camera captured before she left us in December 2015 with Parkinson’s disease. Above, she reads to her great grandson from The Sneetches by Dr. Seuss.
Shaping Future Tense
when nothing else
made any sense
when family strangers
made you tense
your lap unfolded
picture books
that tore down
every guarded fence
great grandson's
heart and mind you shaped
each page
a moment so immense
your fingers curled
his eyes unfurled
his focus on you
so intense
when nothing else
made any sense
picture books
wrote future tense
Da Pup Een Da Snow Storm (Day 2 of February’s Open Write, Day 33 of The Stafford Challenge)
Today, our host at http://www.ethicalela.com for Day 2 of February’s Open Write is Linda Mitchell of Virginia. She inspires us today to make a mash-up poem. You can read her prompt here, along with the poems of others. Here is the basic process she describes:
Read two works, perhaps poems you have loved for a long time. Find lines that speak to each other. Take a line from one poem and mash it up against one from the other. See how many lines complement each other as a new work. Write these lines, or copy and paste these lines, into a new work.
My all-time favorite poet is Mary Oliver, and my favorite poem is The Storm, from her collection Dog Songs. My father gave me a book of poetry entitled Poetry’s Plea for Animals by Frances E. Clarke, and in it there is a poem by T. A. Daly entitled Da Pup Een Da Snow, which may have actually inspired Mary Oliver’s poem The Storm. Oliver’s lines are in bold, and Daly’s are not.
Here is my Mash-Up:
Da Pup Een Da Snow Storm
Eef you jus' coulda seen -
running here running there, excited
gona wild weeth delight
now through the white orchard my little dog
ees first play een da snow
with wild feet
all around' da whole place
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
an' fall down on hees face
teel hees cover' weeth white
until the white show is written upon
in large, exuberant letters
w'en he see da flakes sail
how he chasa hees tail
the pleasures of the body in this world
deed you evra see joy
gona wild weeth delight
with wild feet
mak's heem crazy excite'
you would know w'at I mean
Eef you jus' coulda seen -
Deer-ssert! – Day 1 of the February Open Write, Day 32 of The Stafford Challenge
Today at http://www.ethicalela.com, Margaret Gibson Simon of Louisiana is our host for Day 1 of the February Open Write. She challenges us to write an elfchen, a form she has written almost each day of 2024. You can read her prompt along with (is it elveschen or elfchens that is plural?) here.
She gives us the basic rules:
Elfchen Guidelines:
Line 1: One word
Line 2: Two words about what the word does.
Line 3: Location or place-based description in 3 words.
Line 4: Metaphor or deeper meaning in 4 words.
Line 5: A new word that somehow summarizes or transforms from the original word.
Here on the farm, we are getting ready for a prescribed burn to prevent wildfires and nourish the soil. After the firebreak was cut and the dogs discovered all the wildlife tracks in the soft red clay earth, I could hardly get them back into the house – – it was like a dessert buffet for them! These walks inspired today’s elfchen.
Deer-ssert!
firebreak
illuminates tracks
schnoodle noses enflamed
decadence of wildlife sweets
deer-ssert
The Truth Teller – The Stafford Challenge Day 31
Today’s poem is a free verse poem.
The Truth Teller
he asks
of the truth teller
how come
no one
else is telling
me these
things?
accusing tones
snide glares
stubborn eyes
the truth teller shrugs
gives up again
leaves the old man
in his bitter loneliness
of onion-thin skinned
sword fights of silence
inner battles raging
wielding without wisdom
each life line
severed by his own hands
so we all sit
in smiles and lies
pretending
How to Explain Deodorant Application to a Reeking Hater – Stafford Challenge Day 30 – Double Haiku
There’s No Mask For That
you can’t mask the stench
of hatred that denies a
death with dignity
for her own mother
elder abuse: narcissist
smiling cruelly
About four years ago, I had an ironic conversation about deodorant with a hater, a year before I witnessed the full extent of her putrid stench.
She’d heard I was using aluminum-free deodorant, and so this one who’d bragged for years about her own natural childbirth without any medicines whatsoever and had made the same autocratic decision to withhold all medicines from her mother so she could allow her to die a full-pain cancer death like there’s some sort of trophy for that, struck up a conversation with me.
“So you use natural deodorant,” she informed me, gossip-style, as if I didn’t already know this about myself. I’d only mentioned this to a few friends, so I knew the source of her information immediately. I’d made the switch after a mutual friend was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“I do,” I nodded.
“What kind?” she asked.
“Native.”I’d tried most all the popular brands, but I wasn’t sharing my research.
“Do you like it?”
“I do.” I was keeping my answers short, since conversations with her were awkward and generally nothing but her attempt to gain some kind of ammunition or put someone down.
She looked lost on what to ask next, and I’ll never know what prompted her to take the direction she did, but I’ve wished a thousand times I could go back to that moment and answer her next question a different way.
“So how do you put it on, is it like just maybe three pulls?” This fifty-ish year old woman seemed genuinely confused, as if she’d never used deodorant a day in her life. I wasn’t sure whether to offer to demonstrate how to apply deodorant to the armpits or settle into my suspicion that she ain’t never been quite right, or both. So I settled for her proof of truth.
What I said was “Yes.” And this ended her interrogation..
What I wished I’d said was, “Actually, it’s a little more complicated than your Sure or your Secret or whatever you already use that isn’t working anyway. What you have to do to figure out the number of natural deodorant pulls is first determine the surface area of the solid that actually makes contact with the pit. Then, you use calculus to account for the slope of the solid at the edges if it’s curved, and also take into account whether you are applying it to recently shaved pits, pits shaved two or three days ago, or no-shave Novemberish pits because the hairs actually will hold odor, and they need an extra pull if they’re more than a middle fingernail long. Once you have the surface area of the deodorant calculated, next you need to determine the surface area of your actual pits, using your current clothing size, multiplied by the centimeters squared of the area needing application, and then take the hypotenuse of the cup size of your bra and divide it by the exponent of the pit area. Multiply this by the number of ounces in the deodorant container, and then take the square root of the deodorant’s surface area, multiply it by two for two pits, or (but not and) then divide it in half to account for one pit, and that should give you the number of pulls to apply. It varies by individual.”
I wish I’d blinked hard and cocked my chin to see if she could even do that kind of math.
Buttons Acrostic – Stafford Challenge Day 29
Happy Valentine’s Day!
I was cleaning out a tub of sewing notions when my eyes were drawn to a trio of heart-shaped buttons that cost 70 cents a long time ago. My mother, a master seamstress, always had an ample supply of colors of threads, buttons, and laces for her next project. She made us matching dresses and taught me to sew when I was in elementary school, even though I never graduated to zippers, braking to a hard and fast stop at buttons. Today’s acrostic poem was inspired by these heart-shaped buttons, which I believe may have been destined to be sewn onto a Valentine’s Day top for me. Mom would have been 81 next week, and she still lives on in our memories.
I Love Buttons
Because I wonder what
Unfinished dress, never-
Touched pattern, fabric-
To-be-imagined
Outfit
Never quite got
Sewn........
Common Threads 